The Male Brain

Neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine on her inevitably best-selling new book

You might want to try to keep your own personal pet caveman in the dark on this one, but in her inevitably best-selling new book, The Male Brain (Broadway Books), neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, MD, officially, scientifically lets guys off the hook for skirt-chasing, conking out after sex, avoiding emotionality—even spending Sundays glued to ESPN. Yes, it seems that Brizendine set The Female Brain, her 2006 best-seller, to "marinate in testosterone"—her fave phrase for describing how gestating brains, which all begin as female in the womb, become masculinized about half the time—in order to produce the male bookend to that work, a "brain's-eye view" into men's psyches that gives them, well, a big, fat 262-page excuse.

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Despite accusations leveled in publications from Nature to The New York Times that Brizendine engaged in weak science in The Female Brain, The Male Brain is, like its predecessor, a breezy and loosey-goosey girlfriend-gab take on the state of gender-based brain science. Brizendine often relies on unreplicated or small-scale experiments, studies, and surveys to draw sweeping, possibly oversimplified conclusions about gender and human nature and to spin small distinctions and differences in the data into vive la différence.

Still, it's awfully hard to write off or dismiss an observer with the breadth of knowledge and experience in her field that Brizendine clearly has. Employing data from cognitive neuroscience, brain imaging, genetics, hormonal biology, and primatology, all strung around anecdotes from her own 25-year therapy practice, which includes running the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, the UC system's prestigious medical school, Brizendine professes to illuminate what makes a man a man—and we're kind of obliged to hear her out.

ELLE: So it's really true that the only thing guys are after is sex?Louann Brizendine: It's actually true [laughs]. Males tend to have a level of sexual interest that's about three times greater than that of the average female of the same age. I think females don't necessarily know it's a program that's biologically run. Obviously, there's a choice about how to behave, but I think females would do well to understand how biology's running in the background.

ELLE: You write that men and women have a "deep misunderstanding of the biological and social instincts that drive the other sex." But why and how are we made to misunderstand one another?LB: It may best be explained by long-term and short-term mating programs. An egg gets fertilized and takes nine months to gestate, and that infant requires huge amounts of care, while the investment in time and energy for a male could be a one-shot deal, and he has perhaps successfully gotten his DNA into the next generation. So there's a disparity of interest.

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ELLE: What do you think is the biggest male-female disconnect?LB: It's always that women are afraid they are going to be abandoned and left, and males feel like they are going to be captured and tied down. It's basic biology that really makes for a lot of unhappiness and misunderstanding between the sexes.

ELLE: You write that "our brains are much more plastic and changeable than scientists believed a decade ago," yet most of your book stacks up examples of hardwired differences. You say the nature-nurture debate is dead, yet your book seems to cast you in the nature camp.LB: Nature-nurture is dead because they're really the same thing. Nature is the thing we must understand first, in terms of how things get wired in utero and the phases of brain development. The piece that used to be called nurture is genetically driven changes that come with things like stress, hormonal differences, neglect, abuse, drugs, or toxic substances. Understanding the genetics we're born with and how they get modified by our upbringing and environment is the key.

ELLE: The issue feels unresolved—what are we still debating?LB: The debate was between biologists and psychologists way before we knew anything about genetics and hormones and their effect on the neurodevelopment of the brain, and how our tracks get laid down and sculpted, and how they overgrow like a bunch of carrots and have to be pruned back. Those things weren't known at the time, so the psychology and neurobiology grew up in silos, with no bridges. Those bridges are starting to be built now. There is still some friction because the language of the disciplines isn't even the same.

ELLE: Much of your book plays into stereotypes—that to men, women are little more than their breast-to-waist ratio. That men are emotionally stunted and sex-crazed. And yet you say you are a staunch feminist, trained at Berkeley in the '70s.LB: I had the two voices in my head all during my writing. I think we need to honor the fact that the female brain and biology, with pregnancy and raising children, are very different from men's, like it or not. This means that something needs to happen socially, politically, in the workplace, for women and for men.

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ELLE: Can we really choose how we act if our brain is guiding our impulses?LB: The choice of acting against one's biology happens all the time—we call that becoming civilized. You have to do that. I think understanding those impulses that you're trying to dial down can really help you as an individual take some responsibility for yourself.

ELLE: Your book gives several examples of animals that, depending on the length of a particular gene, become either monogamous mates or philanderers. There is even some evidence in humans of a connection between mating behavior and a receptor's length. Could this get Tiger Woods off the hook?LB: Well, it makes me understand it at a deeper biological level. It still outrages me: Whether you have a long, short, or medium receptor gene, when you have children and families, you're responsible to them. Let's say that men knew how long their gene was, and that the long guys were going to have an easier time staying faithful and the short guys were not, and the short guys were going to have to work harder at it—the same kind of thing happens when people know they're susceptible to diabetes or cancer or heart disease.

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ELLE: Larry Summers quickly became the ex-president of Harvard by asserting that innate aptitude differences may partly explain the dearth of female academics in math and science. Could it be that in some areas there is a difference in aptitude?LB: It's possible, although the Putnam prizes in mathematics used to have no women finalists, but it's had more and more as girls get better math education. I'd say that argues against it. But many think that women have a higher aptitude for staying on the same emotional wavelength. Why is it so hard to believe that we have different aptitudes?

ELLE: But feminists refuse to believe that.LB: That is just wrong thinking, that something can't possibly be that way. For example, genetic differences in muscle metabolism can lead to faster running speeds, as with some Jamaicans. So, to me, it's scientifically untenable to say that men and women are, and must be, completely equal in everything. Summers' fight allows us to have a discussion about these things that are still passionately burning in our culture.

ELLE: The journal Nature said about The Female Brain that you fail "to meet even the most basic standards of scientific accuracy and balance" and accused you of making sex differences in brain structure seem almost to make men and women two different species.LB: If that's what people are getting out of my book, that's an incorrect view. There are many more similarities than there are differences. I'm not trying to write scientific treatises. I'm writing for people who are intelligent but don't do science. In doing honor to its complexity, I think I've hit the mark in some respects and missed the mark in others. Scientifically, looking at gender differences is in its infancy. It's only really important in medicine to study diseases, for example. Gender differences per se are of less interest.

ELLE: What is your most striking conclusion from writing these two books?LB: The thing that is awesome to me—which I see in my office with couples who come to me—I'll ask her, "How do you know he loves you?" and she'll say, "Because he wants to talk to me." But when I ask him, he'll say, "Because she wants to have sex with me." Women don't understand that men feel loved when you want to have sex with them—and if you reject them, it means you don't love them. And if a man can't verbally empathize with a woman when she feels unloved—they're like ships passing in the night. That, to me, speaks volumes. Remember Beauty and the Beast? It's from the song—first she gives a little bit, then he gives a little bit. That's how you can start to see things from the other person's point of view. That captures what's been going on in my office for 25 years.